För att brandmännen på flygplatser ska känna sig trygga när olyckan är framme är det viktigt att de får den information som krävs för att veta hur de ska agera när en flygfarkost kraschar. Utöver att vara ett stöd vid skarpa lägen ska Brand- och räddningsinstruktionen, BRI, vara ett läromedel i brandmännens utbildning och ett komplement under resten av deras yrkesliv. Dagens BRI uppfattas av användarna som en tråkig hemsida som inte är anpassad för dem, därför handlar detta examensarbete om hur BRI bör utformas för att vara användbar, samt bidra till lärande och en god användarupplevelse. Detta arbete har varit en iterativ användarcentrerad designprocess. Arbetet började med en kontextuell undersökning hos användaren för att fastställa deras behov. Utifrån dessa behov resulterade arbetet i ett förslag på ett grafiskt användargränssnitt som följer Saabs grafiska profil och som genom tester visar sig uppfylla användarnas centrala behov. Det visualiserades med en interaktiv prototyp. Genom att strukturera visualiseringarna med tillhörande text, se till att ingen information är dold och tillämpa en konsekvent navigeringsstruktur påverkas användarupplevelsen positivt. Denna studie har identifierat vikten av samspelet mellan information och visualisering för att främja användbarhet och inlärning. / When accidents happen it’s important that the airport's fire fighters feel safe with the knowledge that they have. This is why it’s important that they receive the information that is needed so that they know how to act when an aircraft crashes. In addition to being an aid during critical situations the Fire and Rescue Instruction, FRI, is a digital data bank, which is used to educate new fire fighters, and also to keep fully trained fire fighters up to date. Users perceive the FRI as a boring website which isn't designed for them. Which is why this master thesis will investigate how the FRI should be designed to improve the user experience and increase the learning effect. The process, which has been implemented during this thesis, is an iterative user-centered design process. The work began with a contextual inquiry to determine the users' needs. Their needs were then used to develop a user interface concept that followed Saab's graphic profile. The users’ then evaluated the concept to make sure that it met the users' key requirements. The concept was visualized with an interactive prototype. A positive user experience can be accomplished by structuring the visualizations with its corresponding text, you should also ensure that no information is concealed and apply a consistent navigation structure. This study has identified the importance of the interaction between information and visualizations to promote the learning effect and usability.

Near Field Communication (NFC) approach may be seen as a perspective way to improve user experience of quick data access with mobile devices to various services (secure payments, information exchange between users, etc.) in a city. This thesis concerns the topic of challenges which may be faced by interaction designers using this approach for creating a context-aware mobile solution for personalized data access in service-intensive urban environments. This research is based on considerations from researches, which explored which mobile information needs in particular seemed to be relevant for a modern user. Moreover, affordances and design blends concept are discussed in this work through a prism of the human-computer interaction in a city. ‘Research through design’ concept allowed performing the investigation of the given problem, starting from a user research, followed by prototyping an alternative solution and after - user evaluation of the prototype. Finally, a critical overview of the performed research gives suggestions for further improvement of the project.

This dissertation contributes to conversations regarding the impact of open user centered innovation on cultural production by focusing on the construction and production of religious products within one large-scale open user-centered technological environment, 3D virtual worlds. Particularly, this study examines how virtual world users construct (non-gaming) religious communities and practices and how the technology impacts the forms of religious expression these users create. Due to its existing religious sector and affordances for user-created content, Second Life (SL) was chosen as the context of study for this dissertation project. Building upon Von-Hippel's (2005) user-centered innovation theory, construction and production within three different user-centered religious communities in SL were explored. Using a comparative ethnographic approach over a 14-month period, involving participant observations, interviews and hyper-media techniques, the social construction of customized religious products amidst technical, social, and economic virtual/non-virtual structures were analyzed. Exploratory findings demonstrate that the democratizing of cultural innovation, that is the construction of heterogeneous cultural religious products by the everyday user, is a matter of patterned relational pathways. The greater possible patterned pathways the higher potential for democratized cultural innovation, an increasing number of users developing new ways of doing religion. The fewer patterned pathways the less the potential for democratize cultural innovation and the greater potential for reproducing within the virtual realm the same cultural frames that define the current social order in the non-virtual realm.

Much of the research on metacognition in human factors has focused on prescriptive, normative strategy training. That is, many researchers have concentrated their efforts on finding ways to improve system users’ prediction, planning, monitoring and evaluation strategies for tasks. However little research has focused on the strategies and heuristics users employ on their own to make usability predictions. Understanding usability prediction methods is critical because users’ predictions inform their expectations about whether they will make errors using a product, how much effort they will need to expend to be successful in using the product, whether they can perform two tasks successfully at the same time, whether the costs of learning to use a device are worth the benefits of using it, which tools will assist in accomplishing goals and which tools will make performing the same task more difficult. The following study aims to identify the specific strategies people use to make usability predictions about product designs. From these strategies a set of guidelines, for designers who wish to ensure users’ expectations meet post hoc usability assessments, were proposed. The study was completed in two phases. During the first phase of this study, prediction strategies were elicited by 1) asking participants to make routine product usability judgments, from which implicit strategies can be inferred, and by 2) using explicit free-response methods. Judgments were analyzed using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) methods to establish the number of dimensions that are implicitly used to predict usability. Subject matter experts (SMEs) coded free-response strategies using coding schemes developed in a pilot study. SMEs will also matched user strategies to formal, professional usability standards. The outcome of Phase 1 was usability taxonomy for classifying usability strategies that includes both expert and user language. The procedure was repeated with three different product design classes to determine how strategies differ as a function of the to-be-judged product. During the second phase of the study, a new group of participants rated specific usability attributes of designs to validate the strategies collected from users’ free-responses in Phase 1. Attributes were selected based on the strategies discovered in Phase 1. These usability attribute ratings helped to inform interpretations of the dimensions of the MDS model generated in Phase 1 and provided input into defining the usability attributes that influenced usability predictions. Results of this study reveal that the type design class participants evaluated had a significant effect on the type of strategy participants used to make their a priori usability assessments (UAs). Participants reported using “complexity” or “organization” most often to predict the usability of cookbooks. Participants reported using “mental simulation” or “typicality/familiarity” most often for predicting the usability of drinking glasses. Participants reported using “complexity,” “organization,” and to a lesser extent “typicality/familiarity,” and “mental simulation” as strategies for predicting the usability of cooktops. MDS methods were used to uncover the underlying dimension of the UA space. For drinking glasses, the “fanciness” and “holdability” were associated with UAs. For cooktops, “the number of controls” and whether participants believed “it was easy to understand how each burner was controlled” were associated with making UAs. And for cookbooks, “the length of the instructions” and “poor contrast of the text with the background” were associated with UAs. Overall, there is evidence that at least some participants in Phase 2 used terminology that was consistent with the terminology people used to describe the designs during Phase 1 and that these were congruent with the uncovered strategies.

CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness) is a web-based platform that is intended to improve team experiences for students and faculty in higher education. The goal of this study is to redesign the user interface for CATME employing User-centered Design (UCD) framework. The design process consists of four phases: discover, define, develop, and validate. This study examines the current website to discover potential usability problems by conducting different methodology. Then it moves into robust user research to define the user’s pain points need to be addressed to improve user experience. In order to tackle the usability issues, design solutions are created and evaluated with real users. The result of the study is redesigned UI (user interface) for CATME’s three key pages, the homepage, activity wizard, and data dashboard.

In this thesis, a framework for improving model-driven system design productivity with Requirements-Driven Design Automation (RDDA) is presented. The key to the proposed approach is to close the semantic gap between requirements, components and architecture by using compatible semantic models for describing product requirements and component capabilities, including constraints. An ontology-based representation language is designed that spans requirements for the application domain, the software design domain and the component domain. Design automation is supported for architecture development by machine-based mapping of desired product/subsystem features and capabilities to library components and by synthesis and maintenance of Systems Modeling Language (SysML) design structure diagrams. The RDDA framework uses standards-based semantic web technologies and can be integrated with exiting modeling tools. Requirements specification is a major component of the system development cycle. Mistakes and omissions in requirements documents lead to ambiguous or wrong interpretation by engineers, causing errors that trickle down in design and implementation with consequences on the overall development cost. We describe a methodology for requirements specification that aims to alleviate the above issues and that produces models for functional requirements that can be automatically validated for completeness and consistency. The RDDA framework uses an ontology-based language for semantic description of functional product requirements, SysML structure diagrams, component constraints, and Quality of Service. The front-end method for requirements specification is the SysML editor in Rhapsody. A requirements model in Web Ontology Language (OWL) is converted from SysML to Extensible Markup Language Metadata Interchange (XMI) representation. / The specification is validated for completeness and consistency with a ruled-based system implemented in Prolog. With our methodology, omission s and several types of consistency errors present in the requirements specification are detected early on, before the design stage. Component selection and design automation have the potential to play a major role in reducing the system development time and cost caused by the rapid change in technology advances and the large solution search space. In our work, we start from a structured representation of requirements and components using SysML, and based on specific set of rules written in Prolog, we partially automate the process of architecture design. / by Mihai Fonoage. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Essa dissertação está fundamentada em experiência de atuação no mercado da moda e em elementos históricos sobre a indústria têxtil e de confecção, nas duas últimas décadas do século XX e nas primeiras décadas do século XXI. Ela pretende contextualizar a questão do design de moda neste tempo globalizado sob o ponto de vista do olhar interdisciplinar de uma engenheira têxtil e designer de moda. Questiona-se aqui o dilema vivido pelos jovens designers, seus pares dentro das organizações em que atuam e alguns pontos da realidade da prática do design dentro das empresas de vestuário no Brasil. Nesse contexto, se discute a importância de redefinir o processo de desenvolvimento das coleções, o papel do designer de moda e de viabilizar o diálogo entre os diferentes sujeitos do processo de criação, durante o ciclo de vida de desenvolvimento do produto, a partir da sua conceituação a sua execução. Por fim, o estudo apresenta uma proposta de design integrado e interdisciplinar para a indústria da moda por meio de plataformas colaborativas, utilizando como referencial as teorias de design centrado no usuário e a participação em projetos de transformação por meio de Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) em empresas de confecção no Brasil / This study is based in the actual experience of the author in the fashion market and refers to historical elements of the Brazilian Textile and Clothing industry. The impact of the globalized moment on the intricated context of Brazils contemporary fashion is approached in an exploratory manner through the point of view of a textile engineer and fashion designer. The dilemma faced by young designers when practicing design and their relationships with peers is discussed with the aim of introducing best practices inside the Apparel Industry of Brazil. It is relevant to discuss the role of the fashion designer as well as to investigate the product development processes in the Brazilian companies to stimulate dialogues between the different actors involved in the product development cycle, from concept to execution. The study proposes an integrated and interdisciplinary method of user centered design by means of collaborative platforms of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in Change Management Projects for Brazilian Apparel Industries

Asset management is a time consuming and error prone process. Information Technology (IT) personnel typically perform this task manually by visually inspecting assets to identify misplaced assets. If this process is automated and provided to IT personnel it would prove very useful in keeping track of assets in a server rack. A mobile based solution is proposed to automate this process. The asset management application on the tablet captures images of assets and searches an annotated database to identify the asset. We evaluate the matching performance and speed of asset matching using three different image feature descriptors. Methods to reduce feature extraction and matching complexity were developed. Performance and accuracy tradeoffs were studied, domain specific problems were identified, and optimizations for mobile platforms were made. The results show that the proposed methods reduce complexity of asset matching by 67% when compared to the matching process using unmodified image feature descriptors. / by Reena Ursula Friedel. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Poor diet including inadequate vegetable consumption is among the leading causes of death in the US and UK. Mobile applications (apps) have been heralded as a potentially transformative tool for delivering behavioural nutrition interventions at scale, but most have yet to incorporate theory-based strategies known to drive changes in health behaviours or undergo systematic testing to demonstrate their effectiveness. Moreover, published frameworks to guide the development of such technologies have yet to integrate best practices from academia and industry. The aim of this dissertation was therefore to introduce a process for guiding the development of more effective mobile interventions and to apply that process in the development and evaluation of a mobile application to increase vegetable consumption. This dissertation introduced IDEAS (Integrate, DEsign, Assess, Share), a step-by-step process for integrating behavioural theory, design thinking, and evaluation to guide the development of more effective mobile health interventions. IDEAS was then applied in the iterative development of Vegethon, a mobile app to increase vegetable consumption among overweight adults. Behavioural theory and two stages of qualitative interviews with participants (n=18; n=14) shaped intervention conception and refinement. The final mobile app enabled easy self-monitoring and incorporated 18 behaviour change techniques including goal setting, feedback, social comparison, prompts, framing, and identity. A pilot randomized controlled trial among overweight adults (n=17) was conducted and indicated the initial acceptance, feasibility, and efficacy of the intervention, showing significantly greater consumption of vegetables among the intervention vs. control condition after 12 weeks (adjusted mean difference: 7.4 servings; 95% CI: 1.4, 13.5; p=0.02). A more substantially powered randomized controlled trial among overweight adults (n=135) was conducted and similarly found significantly greater daily vegetable consumption in the intervention vs. control condition (adjusted mean difference: 2.0 servings; 95% CI: 0.2, 3.8, p=0.03). These findings show, for the first time in a rigorous randomized controlled trial, the efficacy of a stand-alone theory-based mobile app to increase vegetable consumption. Given the improved health outcomes associated with greater vegetable consumption, these data indicate the need for longer-term evaluations of Vegethon and similar technologies among overweight adults and other suitable target groups. Theory-based mobile apps may present a low-cost and readily scalable tool for delivering behavioural health interventions. The IDEAS framework may be useful to investigators in the development of their own mobile health interventions.

Although Internet booking system has reached its peak in the recent years many previous researches say there is always a growing interest in the role and nature of design in HCI principles. Small difference can create a large impact in the business of Internet booking system. The future of any online booking system will be heavily depended on how easy and how friendly the system is designed. In our thesis, we are going to suggest what aspects of usability principles are important in making the user interface of current flight booking systems to reach a high degree of usability. For the above purpose we will find usability flaws in the current user interface design of flight booking systems and highlight the potential factors or aspects that make user interface more acceptable to users. To reach this purpose we will use a case study and analyze using an explanation building technique. The empirical data was collected through satisfaction questionnaire which was based on nine “preset tasks” which are designed depending on various usability principles. In our thesis, we will create an understanding on the aspects of usability principles used to make a user interface more acceptable to the users. This understanding will lead future researches in the betterment of interface design of flight booking system.